Virtual Reality is a terrible empathy machine

Paul Bloom · 2 Jan 2024

The piece opens with

Virtual reality simulations are terrible empathy machines: you often come out understanding other lives less than before.

Their wordsThe various versions of VR out there, high-tech and low-tech, are terrible empathy machines. After using them, you often end up with less of an understanding of other lives than you started with.

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Virtual reality simulations are terrible empathy machines: you often come out understanding other lives less than before.

Their wordsThe various versions of VR out there, high-tech and low-tech, are terrible empathy machines. After using them, you often end up with less of an understanding of other lives than you started with.
Our reading
People are nowhere near as good at empathy as they think they are.

Their wordsBut in general, we are nowhere near as good at empathy as we think we are.
Our reading
To understand people unlike us, listening to what they say works better than assuming we know what it is like to be them.

Their wordsInstead of assuming that we can know what it is like to be them, we can focus more on listening to what they have to say.

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